INoreinter 14, 1914 
LAND AND WATER 
SHIFTING THE ENEMY. 
SOME FURTHER EXPEDIENTS FOR MODERN TRENCH WARFARE. 
By COL. F. N. MAUDE, G.B., late R.E. 
SEE from tlie reports of many Belgian correspondents 
that our friend the enemy is preparing quite gigantic 
positions entrenched and hollowed out in a manner 
quite new in field warfare. They are reported as 
stretching south from Brussels across the field of 
Waterloo for miles, and behind them are yet other lines of 
defence, supported by the reconstructed works of Liege and 
Namur, and continuing along the courses of several rivers 
running in deeply eroded channels from the high plateaux 
of Luxemburg. 
In fact, wherever we turn we are bound to encounter months 
of this new kind of abbreviated siege warfare, in which all kinds 
of shifts and expedients will have to be tried. 
I gave some ideas on this subject in my last article, and 
will now continue the list, endeavouring to profit by the mistakes 
of our adversary. 
The Germans seem to have gone " big howitzer mad " ; 
setting aside the quite sensible use of weapons of exceptional 
power to deal with such steel and concrete targets as the Liege 
and Namur and Antwerp defences, they appear to have 
imagined that the moral effect of a shell increases quite 
nowadays, be done by wireless transmission, but this is hardly aa 
yet within the scope of practical politics. The Congreve rocket 
was simply the ordinary rocket of Crystal Palace displays 
especially adapted for war purposes. It answered exceeding!}'' 
well as far as it went, and in the old days in China and up pirate 
rivers in the East it was frequently used with great succes.<i 
for setting fire to villages from boats too small and light to 
carry mortars or guns. But there the idea ended, and it has 
often struck me that it might, nowadays, be most successfully 
revived by combining the idea of rocket propulsion with some 
kind of elementary machine on rollers and steering it by cablo 
from the trenches, at any rate, for relatively short distances. 
There would, moreover, be a kind oE poetic justice about 
its revival ; for, in fact, without the electric attachments it in 
about the earliest kind of self-propelling vehicle ever devised, 
and was the invention of an old German inventor about 15i5, 
who pubUshed a weird book on fireworks and fire machine."?, 
with Ulustrations, I think, at Nuremberg. We have the book or a 
later edition of it in the library of the Royal United Service 
Institution. 
My idea would, therefore, work out something like this : — 
Langridge Explosive Asbestos ' t r 
te. old bolts.] charge I packing K^^^^er 
niits etc. 
¥ixed fin rudder 
enormously in proportion to the " big bang " it makes, and for 
this end have burdened their field armies with a number of big 
howitzers which have been many times more powerful than 
the targets they have recently found have required. 
It may be that the big bang " idea is correct. I feel pretty 
sure that as against the Germans it would prove so, but I submit 
that it is sheer foohshness to drop " Black Marias " on the 
ground with such high velocities that the bang only ensues 
after the shell has buried itself 10 feet deep, and its man-killing 
power is thus enormously diminished by the smothering efEect 
of the surrounding earth' It blows out a big hole convenient 
enough for burying dead horses in, but beyond this its useful 
eSect is comparative!}' limited. 
Our answer should be the propulsion of a shell bigger, much 
bigger, containing a weight of explosives under conditions which 
would ensure its bursting on the ground level at the right time 
and place, and without the disadvantage of requiring tv/cnty-six 
traction engines to use it. Also, it must be efficient at very 
short ranges if desirable. 
The solution I find in a combination of an old naval device, 
much tried and to.^ted, some forty years ago, by the experts of 
H.M.S. Vernon — the naval torpedo school at Portsmouth, and 
a revival of the old Congreve war rocket idea which was 
abandoned, to my mind very prematurely, about the same 
date, when ail attention was focussod on the development of 
artillery. 
The Vemon idea was simple and was intended for blov.-ing 
up harbour booms, caissons, and so forth ; very much the same 
sort of work as we now require on land. 
It consisted of an old ste.-.m pinnace heavily freighted 
with explosive,=i, v/Iiich was set going with a head of steam 
sufficient to ta;:e it well up to its target, and steered by a 
light electric cable from a parent ship following some consider- 
iible distance behind. Of course, in theory, the steering could. 
A heavy iron cylinder with knife-edge bow in front, mounted 
on broad rollers, and weighing a couple of tons, woulS contain a 
rocket in an inside case, packed round with asbestos, in front of 
which wet gun-cotton would be packed, as much as desired, until 
the second cylinder was full, and then round the second cylinder 
the empty space would be filled with bolts and nuts or any other 
old " langridge " to furnish a sufficient supply of man-killing 
fragments. 
The cylinder would have a sufficient preponderance aft to 
ensure that a fin keel should bite well into the ground when 
moving. On second thoughts I would dispense with steering- 
gear altogether, as the vehicle has only to go straight, but keep 
the electric firing cable so as to ensure detonation exactly at the 
right time. 
As for the calculations required, they are well within the 
scope of any youngster from any of our modern universities. 
We all know that rocket composition consists of charcoal, 
sulphur, and saltpetre, mixed together, which when set alight 
burn at a certain temperature — about 3,000° F. if I remember 
rightly — and give ofE so-and-so many cubic feet of gas which 
expands in proportion to the heat evolved. 
Having determined the weight of your machine, sa}' about 
2 tons — and the rolling friction to be overcome — any man 
fresh from the workshops can work out the amount of power 
required to diive it at a given velocity — about 50 feet a second 
would suffice. 
Imagine this crashing through wire entanglements, etc., 
and then bursting exactly over one of the modern deep dug- 
outs the gimners find it so difficult if not impos.sible to attain. 
If I know my Germans, and I think I do, I will wager they 
will be a good deal more disconcerted than ever our lads have 
been by any " Black Maria " of theirs, and we shall not need 
twenty-six traction engines to haul our machine either — we 
can extemporise all the heavy material in the nearest workshop. 
I6» 
